Oldest known trousers originated in Central Asia
ROUGH RIDERS The oldest known trousers, including this roughly 3,000-year-old pair with woven leg decorations, belonged to nomadic horsemen in Central Asia.

Two men whose remains were recently excavated from tombs in western China put their pants on one leg at a time, just like the rest of us. But these nomadic herders did so between 3,300 and 3,000 years ago, making their trousers the oldest known examples of this innovative apparel, a new study finds.

With straight-fitting legs and a wide crotch, the ancient wool trousers resemble modern riding pants, says a team led by archaeologists Ulrike Beck and Mayke Wagner of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin. The discoveries, uncovered in the Yanghai graveyard in China’s Tarim Basin, support previous work suggesting that nomadic herders in Central Asia invented pants to provide bodily protection and freedom of movement for horseback journeys and mounted warfare, the scientists report May 22 in Quaternary International.

“This new paper definitely supports the idea that trousers were invented for horse riding by mobile pastoralists, and that trousers were brought to the Tarim Basin by horse-riding peoples,” remarks linguist and China authority Victor Mair of the University of Pennsylvania.

Previously, Europeans and Asians wore gowns, robes, tunics, togas or — as observed on the 5,300-year-old body of Ötzi the Iceman — a three-piece combination of loincloth and individual leggings.

A dry climate and hot summers helped preserve human corpses, clothing and other organic material in the Tarim Basin. More than 500 tombs have been excavated in a graveyard there since the early 1970s.

Earlier research on mummies from several Tarim Basin sites, led by Mair, identified a 2,600-year-old individual known as Cherchen Man who wore burgundy trousers probably made of wool. Trousers of Scythian nomads from West Asia date to roughly 2,500 years ago.

Mair suspects that horse riding began about 3,400 years ago and trouser-making came shortly thereafter in wetter regions to the north and west of the Tarim Basin. Ancient trousers from those areas are not likely to have been preserved, Mair says.

Horse riding’s origins are uncertain and could date to at least 4,000 years ago, comments archaeologist Margarita Gleba of University College London. If so, she says, “I would not be surprised if trousers appeared at least that far back.”

The two trouser-wearing men entombed at Yanghai were roughly 40 years old and had probably been warriors as well as herders, the investigators say. One man was buried with a decorated leather bridle, a wooden horse bit, a battle-ax and a leather bracer for arm protection. Among objects placed with the other body were a whip, a decorated horse tail, a bow sheath and a bow.

Beck and Wagner’s group obtained radiocarbon ages of fibers from both men’s trousers, and of three other items in one of the tombs.

Each pair of trousers was sewn together from three pieces of brown-colored wool cloth, one piece for each leg and an insert for the crotch. The tailoring involved no cutting: Pant sections were shaped on a loom in the final size. Finished pants included side slits, strings for fastening at the waist and woven designs on the legs.

Million mummy mystery: Egyptian cemetery with 1mn bodies stumps scientists
A mummy of a 18 months old girl

An ancient cemetery in Egypt contains 1 million bodies, according to a team of archeologists who discovered the burial ground. What the site represents remains a mystery, as the scientists are still puzzled about where exactly all the people came from.

"We are fairly certain we have over a million burials within this cemetery. It's large, and it's dense," said Project Director Kerry Muhlestein, an associate professor in the Department of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University (BYU). Muhlestein presented his findings at the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities Scholars Colloquium, held in Toronto in November, Live Science reported.

Archaeologists from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, have been exploring a mysterious cemetery in Egypt for about 30 years. They excavated about 1,700 mummies within the project in Egypt so far. But there is still much work to do.

The archaeologists say that many of the mummies date back to the times when Egypt was a Roman province, from the 1st century BC onward.

Scientists say a nearby village seems too small to produce all these large burial sites. A small pyramid is situated near the cemetery. But it was built more than 4,500 years ago, about 2 millennia before these million mummies were buried.

People buried at the cemetery, which is now called Fag el-Gamous (Way of the Water Buffalo), did not belong to royalty, concluded the researchers. There were no coffins. And the internal organs of the deceased were rarely removed.

"I don't think you would term what happens to these burials as true mummification. If we want to use the term loosely, then they were mummified," Muhlestein said, adding that they were in fact mummified by the arid natural environment.

According to Muhlestein, “the burials are not in tombs, but rather in a field of sand.”

“The people in the cemetery represent the common man,” he said in an email to RT. “They are the average people who are usually hard to learn about because they are not very visible in written sources.”

However, researchers still found some beautiful items at the burial site. The objects include linen, glass and even colorful booties for a child.

"A lot of their wealth, or the little that they had, was poured into these burials," Muhlestein said.

The scientists said it is a large burial site and is densely populated.

“In a square that is 5 x 5 meters across and usually just over 2 meters deep, we will typically find about 40 burials. The cemetery is very large, and so far seems to maintain that kind of burial density throughout,” he added to RT.

Giants and blondes
During excavation the archeologists discovered a mummy of a 18 months old girl which was “beautifully wrapped in a tunic and with other nice wrappings,” the scientists wrote on BYU in Egypt Facebook page.

The researchers say there was evidence that they tried “much of the full mummification process.”

“The toes and toenails and brain and tongue were amazingly preserved. We found a wonderful necklace and two bracelets on each arm. The jewelry makes us think it was a girl, but we cannot tell.”

“She was buried with great care as someone who obviously loved her very much did all they could to take care of this little girl in burial. Very sad. But they succeeded, it was a beautiful burial.“

The scientists found one mummy with a height of more than 2 meters, Muhlestein told the audience in Toronto. The mummy was discovered long before Muhlestein became the project director.

"We once found a male who was over 7 feet (2.1 meters) tall, who was far too tall to fit into the shaft, so they bent him in half and tossed him in," he said.

he researcher later told Live Science that “even with great nutrition, it's really unusual" as generally common people didn’t have enough food at that time.

One more mystery of the mummy burials was the large number of blonde and red-headed mummies.

According to Muhlestein, the researchers can use the database to "show us all of the blonde burials, and [it shows] they are clustered in one area, or all of the red-headed burials, and [it shows] they're clustered in another area."

‘Perhaps we have family areas or genetic groups [in certain areas], but we're still trying to explore that,"he added.

Gold Artifacts Tell Tale of Drug-Fueled Rituals and "Bastard Wars"
Vessels discovered in a Scythian grave mound contained traces of opium and marijuana, confirming the claim of an ancient historian.

Solid gold artifacts discovered in a Scythian burial mound in southern Russia include two bucket-shaped vessels, three gold cups, a heavy finger ring, two neck rings, and a gold bracelet.

They ruled the vast grasslands of Eurasia for a thousand years, striking fear into the hearts of the ancient Greeks and Persians. But they left no cities or settlements behind, only massive grave mounds, called kurgans, dotting the steppes from Mongolia to the Black Sea.

Now one of those kurgans, located in the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia, has yielded an intriguing discovery: golden artifacts that are shedding light on the shadowy world of the Scythians, fierce nomads whose exploits—and drug-fueled rituals—were chronicled by the Greek historian Herodotus.

"It's a once-in-a-century discovery," says Anton Gass, an archaeologist at the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin. "These are among the finest objects we know from the region."

The find—kept secret until now to protect it from looters—first came to light in the summer of 2013, when Stavropol-based archaeologist Andrei Belinski began excavating the kurgan, called Sengileevskoe-2, to clear the way for a power-line project.

''A black residue inside the vessels came back positive for opium and cannabis.''

At first Belinski wasn't optimistic about finding much inside, as there were telltale signs that the kurgan had been plundered in the past. But a few weeks into the excavation, his team came across a thick layer of clay. Digging underneath, they discovered a rectangular chamber lined with broad, flat stones. Inside was something the looters somehow had missed: golden treasures placed there 2,400 years ago.

"It was definitely a surprise for us," Belinski says. "We weren't expecting to find anything like this." (Read about another excavation of a Scythian kurgan and its gold.)

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To archaeologists, the information contained in the images on the gold is exciting. From the warriors’ shoes to their haircuts, the depictions are amazingly lifelike. "I've never seen such a detailed representation of the clothing and weaponry of the Scythians," says Belinski. "It's so detailed you can see how the clothing was sewn."

Gass thinks the scene of the old man slaying the young warriors could be a reference to the "Bastard Wars" reported by Herodotus, who wrote that Scythians spent 28 years on the warpath against neighboring Persia. When they finally returned home, the marauders found intruders in their tents—the bastard children of the Scythians' lonely wives and their slaves. Perhaps the slaughter that ensued was deemed important enough to commemorate in solid gold.

LONDON, (CAIS) -- The cultural authorities in Turkey called the exhibition of ‘The Return of Colures’ a success, as for the first time the Achaemenid tomb chamber, one of the finest examples of the ancient Iranian art of wood painting that survived to the present day, was on show at Yapi Kredi Vedat Nedim Tör Museum

The unique tomb chamber built around 470 B.C.E. for a Persian noble-warrior has remained intact for nearly twenty five centuries.

Impressive drawings depicting scenes of battle between the Persians and their cousins the Scythians, a funerary procession and a hero’s adventure are not only exciting in terms of art but also in historical discourse.

An "exceptional" tomb from the 5th Century BC likely to be that of a Celtic prince has been unearthed on the outskirts of Lavau in France's Champagne region.

The grave containing Greek and possibly Etruscan artefacts was discovered in a business zone, the National Archaeological Research Institute (Inrap) said.
Researchers believe it could shed light on Iron Age European trade.
Finds include a bronze wine cauldron.
A team from Inrap has been excavating the site since October last year, and have dated it to the end of the First Iron Age - a period characterised by the widespread use of the metal.

The burial mound, 40m (130ft) across, has at its heart a 14 sq m (150 sq ft) burial chamber. The deceased and his chariot are in the burial chamber.
"It is probably a local Celtic prince," Inrap president Dominique Garcia told journalists on a site visit.
Inrap said it is one of the largest recorded burial chambers for this period and is "exceptional" not only because of its size but also for the quality of the material unearthed.
The 5th and 6th Century BC were characterised by the rise of Etruscan and Greek city states like Marseille in southern France.
Mediterranean merchants, seeking slaves, metals and other precious goods, opened trading channels with continental Celts.

Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle
Excavation of an ancient battlefield in northern Germany revealed signs of a great battle, such as closely packed bones, as seen in this 2013 photo of the site. One area of 12 square meters held 1478 bones, including 20 skulls.

About 3200 years ago, two armies clashed at a river crossing near the Baltic Sea. The confrontation can’t be found in any history books—the written word didn’t become common in these parts for another 2000 years—but this was no skirmish between local clans. Thousands of warriors came together in a brutal struggle, perhaps fought on a single day, using weapons crafted from wood, flint, and bronze, a metal that was then the height of military technology.

Struggling to find solid footing on the banks of the Tollense River, a narrow ribbon of water that flows through the marshes of northern Germany toward the Baltic Sea, the armies fought hand-to-hand, maiming and killing with war clubs, spears, swords, and knives. Bronze- and flint-tipped arrows were loosed at close range, piercing skulls and lodging deep into the bones of young men. Horses belonging to high-ranking warriors crumpled into the muck, fatally speared. Not everyone stood their ground in the melee: Some warriors broke and ran, and were struck down from behind.

In 1996, an amateur archaeologist found a single upper arm bone sticking out of the steep riverbank—the first clue that the Tollense Valley, about 120 kilometers north of Berlin, concealed a gruesome secret. A flint arrowhead was firmly embedded in one end of the bone, prompting archaeologists to dig a small test excavation that yielded more bones, a bashed-in skull, and a 73-centimeter club resembling a baseball bat. The artifacts all were radiocarbon-dated to about 1250 B.C.E., suggesting they stemmed from a single episode during Europe’s Bronze Age.

“If our hypothesis is correct that all of the finds belong to the same event, we’re dealing with a conflict of a scale hitherto completely unknown north of the Alps,” says dig co-director Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist at the Lower Saxony State Service for Cultural Heritage in Hannover. “There’s nothing to compare it to.” It may even be the earliest direct evidence—with weapons and warriors together—of a battle this size anywhere in the ancient world.
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In 2013, geomagnetic surveys revealed evidence of a 120-meter-long bridge or causeway stretching across the valley. Excavated over two dig seasons, the submerged structure turned out to be made of wooden posts and stone. Radiocarbon dating showed that although much of the structure predated the battle by more than 500 years, parts of it may have been built or restored around the time of the battle, suggesting the causeway might have been in continuous use for centuries—a well-known landmark

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Ancient DNA could potentially reveal much more: When compared to other Bronze Age samples from around Europe at this time, it could point to the homelands of the warriors as well as such traits as eye and hair color. Genetic analysis is just beginning, but so far it supports the notion of far-flung origins. DNA from teeth suggests some warriors are related to modern southern Europeans and others to people living in modern-day Poland and Scandinavia. “This is not a bunch of local idiots,” says University of Mainz geneticist Joachim Burger. “It’s a highly diverse population.”

As University of Aarhus’s Vandkilde puts it: “It’s an army like the one described in Homeric epics, made up of smaller war bands that gathered to sack Troy”—an event thought to have happened fewer than 100 years later, in 1184 B.C.E. That suggests an unexpectedly widespread social organization, Jantzen says. “To organize a battle like this over tremendous distances and gather all these people in one place was a tremendous accomplishment,” he says.

But why did so much military force converge on a narrow river valley in northern Germany? Kristiansen says this period seems to have been an era of significant upheaval from the Mediterranean to the Baltic. In Greece, the sophisticated Mycenaean civilization collapsed around the time of the Tollense battle; in Egypt, pharaohs boasted of besting the “Sea People,” marauders from far-off lands who toppled the neighboring Hittites. And not long after Tollense, the scattered farmsteads of northern Europe gave way to concentrated, heavily fortified settlements, once seen only to the south. “Around 1200 B.C.E. there’s a radical change in the direction societies and cultures are heading,” Vandkilde says. “Tollense fits into a period when we have increased warfare everywhere.”

This skull unearthed in the Tollense Valley shows clear evidence of blunt force trauma, perhaps from a club.

Tollense looks like a first step toward a way of life that is with us still. From the scale and brutality of the battle to the presence of a warrior class wielding sophisticated weapons, the events of that long-ago day are linked to more familiar and recent conflicts. “It could be the first evidence of a turning point in social organization and warfare in Europe,” Vandkilde says. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/slaughter-bridge-uncovering-colossal-bronze-age-battle

Who were Goliath's relatives? Archaeologists closer to uncovering secrets of the Philistines

While no giants have been found, archaeologists have uncovered a Philistine cemetery in Israel. Hailed as an exceptional find, the 3,000-year-old bones and artifacts reveal how the people lived.

After decades of studying what Philistines left behind, we have finally come face to face with the people themselves," said Daniel Master, the American archaeologist who has led an excavation of the site since 1985. "With this discovery, we are unlocking the secrets of their origins."
Master and his team, under the Leon Levy Expedition associated with Harvard University's Semitic Museum and other institutions, have been studying the remains of a Philistine settlement at the edge of the Israeli city Ashkelon for three decades. The cemetery - likely the first such discovery of its kind - was found in 2013 but kept under wraps until just recently.
Hailed as the "crowning achievement" of the decades-long dig, Daniel Master said it was an opportunity to finally see the Philistines "face to face."

Goliath not found among skeletons
Goliath, slain in the Bible by David, Israel's future king, is arguably the most famous Philistine. His people lived some three millennia ago as strangers in Jewish territory near what is now Tel Aviv.The Philistines were traders and seafarers who lived in the area between what is now Gaza and Tel Aviv from 1200 to about 600 BC. They spoke a language of Indo-European origin, did not practice circumcision as the Jews did, and ate pork and dog, according to the researchers.
They were also said to have been experts in making wine and oil.

"In their teeth, we can see that they did not have an easy life," anthropologist and pathologist Sherry Fox said. "We see these lines that indicate a growth interruption as the teeth are forming. There were problems in childhood with either fever or malnutrition."
She added that no evidence of extraordinarily large Philistines had been found. Of the 145 skeletons found, the biggest Philistine buried at the site is thought to be 1.8 meters (nearly 5' 11") tall.

The book of Samuel in the Old Testament recounts the famous duel between the giant Philistine Goliath and the young Israelite David, whose rock and sling fell the powerful opponent.
The Philistines in the Bible
In the Old Testament, the Philistines are described as the arch enemies of the Israelites and portrayed as savage plunderers. The book of Samuel also describes how they captured the Ark of the Covenant, which contained the Ten Commandments.
According to the researchers, the Philistines were completely destroyed by Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in the year 604 BC.
While the skeletons undergo careful examination by Daniel Master's team, some of the other finds from the site - including jugs, bowls and jewelry - went on display at the Rockefeller Archeology Museum in East Jerusalem on Sunday (10.07.2016).http://www.dw.com/en/who-were-golia...overing-secrets-of-the-philistines/a-19392151